Pennsylvania Bill Cuts NFA Tie

A Pennsylvania lawmaker wants to sever the state's gun regulations from a federal law that's rapidly losing its legal footing.

State of play: The National Firearms Act's tax-and-register scheme for suppressors and short-barreled rifles took a direct hit this year when the "One Big Beautiful Bill" zeroed out the $200 tax stamp. That mattered because the tax was the whole reason courts upheld the registration requirement in the first place — the same logic the Roberts Court used to save Obamacare. Strip the tax, and a federal court has already ruled the registration mandate unconstitutional.

Rep. Rob Kauffman says that leaves states like Pennsylvania exposed, because state law has long piggybacked on federal NFA compliance. If federal enforcement of NFA registration collapses or goes dark in litigation, a state statute written to track federal requirements could end up frozen in a weird legal limbo — technically still on the books, but tied to a federal rule nobody's enforcing or that no longer legally exists.

Kauffman's fix: decouple the two entirely.

"We're essentially just trying to decouple our regulations with the federal regulations," Kauffman said. "Pennsylvanians know, OK, you have to comply with state law, but your compliance with state law is not contingent upon your compliance with federal law as well."

The legal question: This isn't a repeal. Gun owners in Pennsylvania would still answer to both state and federal statutes — nothing about actually buying, owning, or transferring an NFA item gets easier on its face. What changes is the plumbing underneath: state law would no longer automatically inherit whatever chaos, uncertainty, or outright unconstitutionality shows up in the federal registration scheme.

"You have to comply with federal law. You have to comply with state law," Kauffman said. "But we are not conditioning our compliance with state law with also the compliance of federal law."

Between the lines: Practically, this means Pennsylvania wouldn't be able to use a defunct federal tax stamp or a possibly-illegal registry as a backdoor way to keep restricting items Congress and the courts have already moved to deregulate. No new bill needed to loosen anything — just a firewall preventing state law from quietly tightening as federal law falls apart.

Yes, but: Kauffman himself isn't confident this clears Pennsylvania's divided General Assembly. Decoupling cuts both ways — it's protected gun owners the last few years as federal deregulation trended in their favor, but the same mechanism could just as easily lock in restrictions if the political winds shift the other direction down the road.

What to watch: Whether Kauffman can get a hearing at all in a legislature split closely enough that most gun bills go nowhere fast. Other NFA-linked states are watching too — Pennsylvania won't be the last legislature to realize its gun code is quietly wired to a federal law that might not survive the decade.

The bottom line: As the NFA's tax-and-register framework wobbles in court, states tied to it need to decide now whether they want their own laws to wobble along with it.